OK - so it is already the latest version. Version I installed that failed was also 1.0.0

marxian hasn't logged in for a while, maybe he prefers a bug report in git or a pm will get his attention.

After a bit of testing last night it appears that the cutenews binary is run with a flag to start either the widget or window.
So /opt/cutenews/bin/cutenews --window works, I would assume that the issue is the N900 .desktop folder is now executing an old start script "showwindow"?